In which cases one might face problems ?
Disk managers:
When disk managers are installed on the first hard disk e.g. the OnTrack or
EZ-Drive disk manager, then an installation of the boot manager Boot-US
to the MBR may cause problems. Typically disk managers are used in older
PCs which are without LBA support for accessing disks larger than 500 MB. When the
mainboard BIOS supports EIDE disks or offers LBA access disk managers are
usually neither required nor installed.
The incompatibility of a boot manager (when installed on the MBR) with
disk managers has two reasons. Firstly, both programs are installed potentially
on the same sectors, i.e. on the MBR and the beginning of the track 0.
Secondly, when the boot manager Boot-US is installed on the MBR it becomes
active before the disk manager. This means the boot manager is not supported
by the disk manager and therefore the boot manager can access the wrong
sectors of the disk.
When the boot manager is installed on a primary partition the above mentioned problems should
not arise. In this case the MBR contains the necessary code to start the
disk manager before the boot manager becomes active, and both programs reside
on different sectors.
ABIT RAID adapters:
The following warning does not apply to the case where the RAID adapter is used
just as a fast IDE channel and no true RAID functions are active. In this case there
are no RAID configuration data which would have to be stored.
If RAID functions are used the corresponding RAID configuration data must not get destroyed,
otherwise, you won't be able to access the data on the RAID disks any more.
It seems that the ABIT UDMA RAID adapter stores its configuration data directly on
user accessible sectors on the hard disk, i.e. on the track 0.
This way of storing the configuration data is extremely unsafe. The data can be easily
overwritten, for example, when the boot manager Boot-US is installed on the MBR,
or when a disk manager is installed on the MBR.
All restrictions and warnings about disk managers also apply to the ABIT RAID adapater.
For example, you must not install the boot manager of Boot-US to the MBR when using
an ABIT RAID adapater.
When the boot manager is installed on a primary partition problems should
not arise.
Complicated configuration:
The following cases are classified as complicated configuration:
- Disk number of boot partition has been changed
- Partitions are booted over several steps
- Partitions are not independent
In such cases you should be careful when you install the boot manager
Boot-US. The boot process is quite different from the one for which
Boot-US has been designed. Boot-US assumes that it is sufficient to simply
load the boot sector of the desired partition from disk and start it unchanged.
When the disk number of the boot partition is changed, for example if
a new disk is inserted or removed, it is necessary to specifically
modify the boot sector in order that it can still be used to boot the
partition. For example, this happens when Windows 95/98/ME is installed on the first disk
and another disk is installed ahead of the first disk. The former first disk now becomes
the second disk and Windows 95/98/ME now resides on the second disk. Boot-US does
contain special support for booting DOS and Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 from
a "second" hard disk.
For other operating systems a similar support might be necessary but it is
not yet present in Boot-US.
The other problematic case is when more than one partition is involved
in the boot process. When the boot manager is installed care must
be taken that all partitions involved remain visible during the
boot process. The boot manager of Boot-US has no problems at all in
loading the boot sector of a hidden partition but the resp. operating system
probably will fail to start when the boot partition is hidden.
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